Abstract
This book is about psychology’s grounding in morality – or, in other words, about the ethical foundations and implications of psychology. It presents the argument that psychological phenomena are inherently moral phenomena, and that psychology, as an array of investigative and interventionist practices, is, and ought to be, a moral science. Throughout the book, I aim to present a unified view of psychology and morality, not as two disjointed fields that are accidentally brought together, but as deeply and inherently related in many different ways. Often, however, the relations between psychology and morality are not recognized by psychologists themselves and this, I argue, is detrimental to the discipline, but also to the society that is affected by the workings of psychology in many different ways. Part I begins with a number of critical investigations into how modern psychology has shaped and in some ways distorted our views of morality and ourselves, and part II advances more positive and prescriptive views about how properly to conceive of morality and its relation to psychology.
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Notes
- 1.
In general, I use the terms “morality” and “ethics” interchangeably. “Ethics” comes from the Greek ethos (character) and “morality” from the Latin mores (which also means character, custom, or habit) (Annas, 2001). I work with a broad definition of these concepts to refer to the oughtness of human existence, i.e., to the idea that human life is not just one factual state of affair after another, but centrally involves non-arbitrary and non-conventional normative demands (to act, think, feel, and be in required ways).
- 2.
The interpretive-pragmatic view owes much to John Dewey’s pragmatism, to Charles Taylor’s hermeneutic theory of values, action, and identity, and to Aristotle’s virtue ethics (especially as it has been developed by Alasdair MacIntyre). In addition, the broad field of discursive psychology, especially in Rom Harré’s version, has been inspirational. Like Dewey’s pragmatism and Taylor’s hermeneuticism, Harré claims that the conversation is the most useful model for understanding psychological phenomena. As unfolding episodes, conversations are structured, not by causal laws, but by normative demands that should be studied by psychology.
- 3.
- 4.
Morality is psychologized when conceived as the result of psychological reactions, operations, likings, or desires. As will be argued in this study, moral values and the reasons for action that they provide are not psychological properties of the agent (e.g., desires), but aspects of our world of human interaction and social practices (this point is argued philosophically in Dancy (2000)).
- 5.
I am aware that the metaphor of “spaces” has the unfortunate consequence that one is easily led to think dualistically of two disjointed worlds (nature vs. culture, causation vs. normativity) that have nothing to do with one another. I am not wedded to this metaphor, and I am skeptical of its dualistic connotations, but I do believe that it serves as a useful way of pointing to the important differences between material and intentional (normative, moral, etc.) properties of the world, as long as we remember that they are properties of a world (and not two different worlds in themselves).
- 6.
My claim that psychological phenomena are rightly placed in the space of reasons should not be taken to imply that we always have well-articulated reasons for what we do. In most situations we do not have conscious aims and corresponding justifications. I want to avoid the intellectualist fallacy that Bourdieu has underlined: “Very often researchers, because they are inspired by a will to demystify, tend to act as if agents always had as an end, in the sense of goal, the end, in the sense of conclusion, of their trajectory” (Bourdieu, 1998:82). We should not think that agents always “have reasons to act and that reasons are what direct, guide, or orient their actions” for “Agents may engage in reasonable forms of behaviour without being rational” (p. 76). This I fully accept, but still, I think it is undeniable (and I don’t think Bourdieu would have denied this either) that social and psychological life depends on our discursive practices of giving and receiving reasons for action, and that without such practices we could not have what we consider full-fleshed human mental life. When Aristotle defined the human animal as a rational animal (a zoon logon echon) he did not mean that we always act rationally, but that what defines us is our capacity for conceptual thinking and speech. Heidegger (1927:47) followed Aristotle on this point and noted that zoon logon echon should be taken to mean “that living thing whose Being is essentially determined by the potentiality for discourse,” but this does not lead to the (faulty) view that we always have reasons for what we do.
- 7.
Geisteswissenschaften is thus not an old word, as many think, but the mid-nineteenth century German translation of Mill’s “moral sciences.” Of course, Hegel had conceived of his Phenomenology as a Science of Spirit – or, in German: a Geisteswissenschaft (Hegel, 1977) – but this is not yet the plural form Geisteswissenchaften, as used in the sense of the social sciences, e.g., by Dilthey (1977) in the later hermeneutic tradition.
- 8.
Toulmin (2001:135) confers the rise of this kind of “moral theory,” separated from other kinds of inquiry, to Henry More and the seventeenth century Cambridge Platonists. The Aristotelian and medieval focus on casuistry, rhetoric, and practical reasonableness was then replaced by a focus on abstract theories.
- 9.
Even though the practical sciences were superseded in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by theoretical sciences, subsequent scholars in such fields as economics still prided themselves with belonging to “moral philosophy.” Adam Smith, moralist of the Scottish Enlightenment, and political economists like Jeremy Bentham and later John Stuart Mill “systematically discussed motivation and ethics as well as economic realities. Their science of man was a moral philosophy,” as Roger Smith has put it (Smith, 1997:317).
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Brinkmann, S. (2011). Psychology and Morality: An Interpretive-Pragmatic View. In: Psychology as a Moral Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7067-1_1
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